Short cuts

Date: January 17 2013

Paul Kalin

CAMPION MINI-SERIES

March will also see the release of Jane Campion's keenly awaited TV mini-series Top of the Lake, which will debut locally on UKTV on March 24, less than one week after the US Sundance Channel. It will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival later this month. Elisabeth Moss, David Wenham, Peter Mullan, Tom Wright and Holly Hunter star in the New Zealand-shot murder mystery, in which Moss' investigative detective searches for a missing 12-year-old who is five months pregnant. Campion co-wrote and co-directed the show with Gerard Lee and Garth Davis, respectively.

SCREENWRITER CONFERENCE

Veteran British screenwriter Paul Abbott,whose list of impressive credits include Shameless, State of Play and Cracker, will be heading to Melbourne shortly as a headline guest of the National Screenwriters Conference. Other guests include Oscar-winning screenwriter Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society), producer Emile Sherman (The King’s Speech), writers Jan Sardi (Shine), John Collee (Happy Feet) and Stephan Elliott (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). The program includes sessions on adapting fact into fiction, led by Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson (The Sapphires) and Kris Wyld (Dangerous Remedy), how to craft compelling factual TV by Michael Cordell, one of the creators of Go Back To Where You Came From, and the rise of comedic drama by Rake writer Andrew Knight and Offspring’s Debra Oswald. Registrations for the biennial event close on February 4. The conference takes place at the Cape Schanck Resort on February 20-22.

www.awg.com.au/nsc.

FILM KICKS OFF

Richard Gray’s AFL-themed feature Blinder will be released on March 7. Shot last year in and around Torquay, it stars Jack Thompson as a football coach who mentors an ex-player (Oliver Ackland) who has returned home after 10 years following a scandal that tore apart the town and team. Gray’s third film in as many years after Summer Coda and the US-shot Mine Games also stars Josh Helman, Rose McIver, Anna Hutchison, Zoe Carides, Bob Morley and Angus Sampson, and includes ex-footballers Glenn Archer, Adrian Gleeson and Sam Kekovich as producers. Blinder will be released by new theatrical sales company The Backlot Studios, which was recently launched by former Paramount and Roadshow executives Tony Ianiro and Mark D’Angelo.

FESTIVAL FARE

Four Australian short films will join the previously announced features The Rocket and Satellite Boy in the youth-focused Generation program of next month’s Berlin Film Festival. The Amber Amulet is directed by Matthew Moore and co-written by Moore and Genevieve Hegney, adapted from the novella of the same name by Craig Silvey. It is Moore’s second short film at Berlinale. Summer Suit is directed and produced by Rebecca Peniston-Bird and is the story of a 10-year-old tomboy who discovers an old suit that gives her a new sense of identity. You Like It, I Love It is a comedy from writer/director James Vaughan, while Michael Spiccia’s Yardbird, about a young girl who takes on the local bullies that torment her father, screened in Competition at the 2012 Cannes Festival.